NVIDIA nForce 500: Biostar and MSI Aim for the Gold

Synthetic Graphics Performance

The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.





In our first tests, the Biostar and MSI boards lead the NVIDIA based systems by a small margin in each benchmark. However, the results are so close that it would be extremely difficult to determine a winner.

General System Performance

The PCMark05 benchmark developed and provided by Futuremark was designed for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. This benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of Graphics subsystems, CPU, Hard Disk, and Memory configurations along with multithreading results. In this sense we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.



The margins are closer in the PCMark05 results but the Biostar board continues to show an advantage over the other NVIDIA based boards. Although these results are grouped tightly, this benchmark will show differences between platforms and provides an overview into how well each board will handle general office and video/audio applications along with simple multitasking of these program tests.

Rendering Performance

We have added the Cinebench 9.5 and POV-RAY 3.6 benchmarks as they heavily stress the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. We utilize the standard benchmark demos in each program along with the default settings. Cinebench 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image.







The Biostar board continues to make a strong showing in these benchmarks although all of the boards are tightly clustered in the scores. The Dual-Core Cinebench and POV-Ray results show the nForce 500 leading the nForce4 chipset by a measurable amount most likely due to the benefits of the increased DDR2 memory bandwidth.